Short-lived governments are routine in some democracies, with uncertainty the norm and predictability ever elusive. Yet never in London, where hundreds of years of steady parliamentary rule set a standard for the world going back to the first prime minister, Robert Walpole, three centuries ago. His two decades were a picture of stability.
Not now, as His Majesty’s government is in chaos, with Prime Minister Liz Truss out after a mere six-week stay at 10 Downing St., besting even the brevity of the forgotten premiership of George Canning, who died after only four months when John Quincy Adams was president. Did Truss even have time to measure the drapes?
The prime minister fell on her face wrestling with a beast of an economic problem — proposing huge tax cuts and deregulation, which so rattled financial markets that the Bank of England had to move to support government-issued debt. Truss did a 180, but it was too late. She had lost the confidence of Britons and, more critically for her, the confidence of the other 356 Conservative members of Parliament.
